Danny Bowman

"Sometimes, I want to tell you I love a thing about you, but I don't."
"Why not?" She went for quizzical, but landed closer to strained.
"Everything I could say I love about you could disappear one day."
"What about my sense of humor?"
"Even that. I think a sense of humor is just the suspicion, not yet disproved, that everything isn't as bad as everyone says. You can laugh at the ocean from a boat. Only a crazy person laughs adrift." She laughed half-heartedly. "It's just, I'm afraid that if I tell you the things I love about you, they might seem like petals on a flower, and, as they fall away, which they will, how are you to know that it's the stem and the leaves and the roots, even the soil and the bugs and the fertilizer, that it's those things I love too so it doesn't matter about the petals - that I'm just enjoying them while they bloom?"

As crisp October gives way to Melville's "damp, drizzly November," fearful gazes and an uncertain gloom roll in. But some yell defiantly at the photographers of their decline.

"I didn't say that. I didn't say that at all. Don't make things up" | "Well, *are* you happy? Lately you've seemed... droopy." | "Look, all I'm saying is we used to be outside. In the sun." | "Yeah, baking." | "We were _growing_, Pierre. Growing. Now what are we doing?"

Encased in wax with enemies approaching, she acknowledged at last that mistakes were made in her pursuit of the light.

This coast,
This gentle line of foot-worn earth,
Slipping seductively into unkind depths.
Here one follows a sandy descent
To bottom-feeding thoughts,
Luminous and terrifying in the black.
Here one swells with the tide,
Crashing back to shore,
Glorious and inexorable.

A thought, all colors and perfume, hastens past the stodgy table your mind has drearily occupied for the past half hour. Your face flings a flirtatious eyebrow upward. But your mouth wavers, suspended in the imminence of a frown, as you question whether the lilac fragrance didn't have just a hint of masked rot.

Legend has it - a beginning that should arouse suspicion and ambivalence in equal parts as to the worth of what is about to be told - that the women of Luss - where a 6th century saint named Kessog was martyred, possibly/probably/possibly by "Druids," his body wrapped in herbs, giving the village its name, the Gaelic word for "herbs" - would row the men of the village to this island when they got drunk and leave them to sober up overnight - each man sprawled out on his own stone snoring a part in one big bullfrog chorus, I imagine - before ferrying them back in the harsh, blurry morning.